Bøger af Sharon Rhutasel-Jones

The author's first cat, Taxi, taught her to keep her chin up as she watched him struggle to live. The fan blades of a swamp cooler had hacked him almost to death. Thus begins her memoir of seven decades of learning from cats who have taught her that the impossible becomes the possible when she follows their example.

In her humorous and poignant memoir, Living by Ear, Sharon Rhutasel puts readers into a classroom with the kinds of adolescents everyone knows. She brings to life real kids sharing a part of their lives with a wayward teacher, as she calls herself, who is guided more by her heart than by her lesson plans. Among her students, we meet a bored overachiever who just wanted to be pointed in an interesting direction and told to explore, an insecure boy who overcame stuttering to become a published writer, and a poet who hated high school then became a teacher. Along with taking us through parts of her fifty-one years of teaching, Rhutasel gives us the backstories of her role-model father and the childhood sweetheart she married even though he caused her to break her nose by crashing into a fire hydrant. As Living by Ear continues to unfold, we experience the tragedy of her widowhood as well as the vicissitudes of her second marriage to a mirror image of herself. She sprinkles poems and recipes into tales of barbers, a music teacher, and a fishmonger. Some of her stories can serve as a tantalizing tour through parts of Africa as well as northern New Mexico. Through it all, we know she has listened to her heart, insisting that our hearts have a special kind of wisdom that is inaccessible to rational thinking.